The professional cost of being a scholar who tries to bring together more than a few of the tools from a different discipline is often high. For those of us in the humanities and the ‘soft’ social sciences, doing more than borrowing a tool from a convenient shelf to shore up an argument here and there demands an extremely large amount of ‘free’, that is not only unfilled but also unfunded, time, the only start-up capital of many of these scholars. In the book under review, Edward J. Ahearn has invested himself thoroughly and well in producing a genuinely interdisciplinary piece of work.

Ahearn brings to a pre-existing mastery of French literature, an impressive understanding of the history of city-centred sociology in the United States. Knowledgeable and as sometimes admiring as Ahearn is of social science, this book is a brief for the frankly proprietary point that the novelist and the poet, working at their best, see more that is of lasting value than can be found in the best ethnographer or anthropologist's ‘thick description’. We know the world best when these two ways of seeing it are brought together. Over the last generation, as the civic circle has widened in our society and in some others, social science has been dethroned as the singular voice of proper social analysis. Many historians, guided by the work of Mary Furner and Dorothy Ross, have come to understand that social science is, in its forms and in its substance, part and parcel of the surrounding political culture. The key to living with this fact does not lie in seeking to break this inevitable connection, but in being explicit about our orientation to it. Ahearn brings something new and valuable to this discussion.

Ahearn uses a series of skilfully rendered juxtapositions of literary ‘fiction’ and ‘social science’ to make this important point stick, beginning with juxtaposing the poetry of Charles Baudelaire with the writings of one of the French founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, and continuing this technique through nine fine chapters on ‘American evolutions’, which bring us to up to our own time. The contemporary scene is captured through pairings of contemporary writers, such as Don De Lillo and Toni Morrison, with social scientists chronicling the experience of the modern transnational metropolis, represented by New York City.

Ahearn's ability to use the writing of Bertold Brecht, Richard Wright and Saul Bellow to critique the Chicago School and surrounding cultural assumptions about what it takes to ‘make it’ in America is especially persuasive. Also persuasive is Ahearn's juxtaposition of Toni Morrison's Jazz with recent scholarly examinations of the relationship between public and private power (such as Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses and the debate over Clarence Stone's ‘regime theory’) in the shaping of the everyday lives lived by less powerful ‘others’, whose members can be found across all races and ethnicities.

One effort that did not work quite as well for me as these others was the attempt, in chapter six, to bring Herman Melville's short story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ together with James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish to consider the place of bureaucracy in modern city life. Ahearn's other presentations worked well for this historically minded reader because time, place and writers were all in relatively close alignment, making for the sharpest and clearest interaction between different voices, ideas and approaches. To his discussion of each of these three authors, Ahearn brings an impressive mastery of the surrounding literature. The thematic congruities between elements of Foucault and elements of Melville were often compelling. In the final analysis, however, the fit between the parts was not as well fashioned here as it was elsewhere. That said, this chapter should not be considered an experiment gone wrong. Engaging in truly original research often means that some experiments will not go quite as well as others, while still yielding some valuable results.

Edward Ahearn has paid the high price required of serious interdisciplinary scholars and he has given us a durable model of what can be accomplished. The cumulative impact of Ahearn's account is to remind us how often, in other times and places, we have been ‘here’ before, either castigating the poor, or defending them against forces which are sometimes as hard to characterize as they are to fight. Nonetheless, the record compiled here also confirms that we are at our human best when we keep trying to understand those who have been branded as ‘others’ in our time.